How My Small Business Marketing Plan Unveiled the Big Mistake.
One of the most critical mistakes you can make as a service professional is trying to offer too wide a variety of services to too many categories of clients. You simply can't survive by trying to be all things to all clients.
It's absolutely crucial that you understand that certain types of clients offer you more opportunity than other types. This doesn't mean that one type of client is good and another type is bad. It simply means that you have to carefully choose where you want to concentrate the limited amount of time, effort, and money you have to invest in your business.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I first started working as a marketing consultant (after 6 years of toiling as a direct response copywriter), I decided that I would save the world by helping small businesses become hugely successful big businesses.
Big mistake.
You see, there really is no such thing as "small businesses". There may be small camera shops, small consulting practices, small grocery stores, small doctor’s offices, small accounting firms, small dry cleaners, and so on. But there's no such animal as a "small business." Sort of like Bigfoot, "small businesses" are rumored to exist, but none have ever actually been sighted.
Now you may be wondering, "But what's wrong with wanting to help small businesses?" And that's a fair question. The problem is, when you define a phantom category of business that doesn't really exist, there's no effective way to market to them.
There are two reasons for this. First, different types of small businesses have very different requirements for how they market their products or services. Can you guess what the first thing is a dry cleaner would ask a marketing consultant?
"How many other dry cleaners have you helped?"
And you can bet that if you don't have a fairly substantial number of dry cleaners on your client roster, you're going to have a tough time getting your dry cleaner prospect to do business with you.
Now take a guess at what the first thing is an accountant would ask a marketing consultant.
"How many other accountants have you helped?"
Are you beginning to get the picture? Without a track record in any given industry, it's very difficult to get a prospect to seriously consider using your services.
Secondly, marketing your services is time consuming and can be expensive. It's demanding enough to market to a tightly defined segment of clients. But when you have to market to all kinds of businesses, you'd better have some pretty deep pockets to even get started.
Eventually, I realized that I had to narrow the types of businesses I offered my services to. Since I had been quite successful in publishing my own information products and training programs, one of the first tightly defined segments I chose to work with was small- to medium-sized publishing companies.
This did wonders for my business. First, I could easily locate prospective clients. There were publishing associations, publishing magazines, and publishing newsletters. I could rent their mailing lists, speak at their industry events, and publish and run ads in their trade publications.
Equally important, I could tailor a specific marketing message for this group and this group only. By understanding the hot buttons that motivate this segment, my marketing could be personalized to their most vital needs. Attracting new clients became significantly easier.
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